


gravitational effects of the moon

by gsparkle



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Be_compromised Promptathon, Be_compromised Valentine's Day Promptathon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:35:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9824804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/pseuds/gsparkle
Summary: Natasha seems to be the only one immune to Clint's so-called "charms," and Clint seems incapable of making a move.





	1. moon, river, and me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for be_compromised's 2017 Vaentine's Day Prompt-a-thon!
> 
>  **prompt:** "the sun is gone but you remain, glorious and undimmed." Lin-Manuel Miranda

“I don’t know how you can work with him and not just _drool_ over those arms,” remarks the younger agent. She’s been unfortunate enough to be paired with Natasha for sparring, and she’s currently trapped in a headlock because she’d stopped to watch Clint wrestle his own trainee to the mat. This was her excuse for being distracted, which Natasha thinks is frankly ridiculous.

“They’re just muscles,” she says, maintaining the hold on the agent’s neck. “Anyone who trains as much as he does would look similar; and anyway, letting yourself get distracted by things like that are what get you killed.” Not that she, you know, endorses the Red Room’s methods or anything, but at least she was trained from an early age not to let anything, _especially_ a man, get between her and her objective. “Let’s go again,” she sighs, releasing the agent. “And _don’t_ look at Barton.”

Half of SHIELD, it seems, has a crush on him, which Natasha chalks up to the fact that nobody else works as closely with him as she does. Is he physically fit? Sure, but so are scores of other agents, she reasons, and _they_ don’t shoot glitter bomb arrows. “Fine,” says whichever Koenig brother is on the latest mission, “But what about that lopsided smile?”

“That smile means trouble,” Natasha informs him. “It’s calculated; see, I can do it, too.” She breaks out her best impression of Clint’s ingenue smile, which in her opinion is basically flawless, but Koenig sniffs and inform her that she lacks Clint’s charm.

“You wouldn’t think he’s charming when he’s snoring in your ear, either,” she snaps. This is the thing she can’t convince the growing number of people who want into Clint’s tac pants: that disarming smile and the roguish twinkle in his eyes disguise the fact that Clint Barton is a human disaster who leaves his apartment windows open during trips and comes back to a loft full of pigeons. Despite the fact that Clint is her confidante, best friend, and frequent co-conspirator, it’s no difficulty to keep her head clear around him because, due to their closeness, she knows every single one of his disgusting, annoying, and obnoxious habits.

“How is it that nobody but me realizes how completely weird you are,” she complains as they make camp in the foothills of the Dolomites. Fury’s given them downtime after their mission in Bressanone, and after hiking for a day in the summer warmth of northeast Italy, they’re both damp and sticky with sweat. Natasha deals with this by guzzling her entire canteen; Clint, meanwhile, has dumped his pack on the ground and jumped, fully clothed, into the river. “Why is there nobody else here to experience Clint Barton, Certified Kook, in action?”

She’s not standing close enough to the river to be splashed, but he tries anyway. “Nobody says ‘kook’ anymore,” he teases, flopping backward into the water with a loud splat. “Besides, it’s hot as balls; _you’re_ weird for not getting in.”

Natasha bites her lip. He _does_ look like he’s having fun; with the sun dipping unhurriedly into the horizon, the river is turning an inviting shade of pink. She is kicking off her hiking boots, still considering, when something sopping wet comes flying out of the water and catches her on the arm. Holding up the missile, she discovers that it’s Clint’s discarded shirt; turning her head to glare at him, she is met with a smile crammed with all his asshole charm.

“I’m going to drown you,” she promises, shucking her shorts and t-shirt before launching herself into the water. It _is_ refreshing, but she’s not going to admit that; instead, she begins what has to be the silliest fight she’s ever committed herself to. They wrestle each other to the riverbed, splashing and yelling like idiots, and it’s so much _fun_ that Natasha doesn’t realize that the sun has set until Clint drops under the surface and she can’t see anything other than faint ripples as he stealths around. When he pops up and yells “Gotcha!” before grabbing her by the waist, she shrieks even though she’s not surprised.

This is how the game goes, or so she tells herself, but the rules have changed in the moonlight. In sunset, she swung easily out of his grasp and regrouped for her next attack, but in the moonlight his arms are still tight around her and she’s forgotten to dance away. Clint’s golden hair is darkened from the water and sticks up at all ends like a halo; his always-laughing blue eyes are undimmed in the dark. The moon has poured like silver mercury over the two of them: her slender hands on his broad shoulders, his tanned forearms a stark contrast to where he holds her around her pale midriff. Droplets cling to his eyelashes and rivulets track lovingly around his muscles and he is glorious in a way she has never, ever seen.

“Nat,” he says, quiet and careful, like he’ll break the glassy surface of the water if he speaks at full volume.

“Clint,” she says back. The spotlight of the moon surrounds them in dappled light, and she thinks, maybe, that this is how people become nymphs and water spirits, staring endlessly until they’re washed away together. There’s a pause, and she lets her eyes drift closed, and then--

And then she’s flying through the air, bumping against the shallow riverbed before she fully realizes what happened. By the time she’s sputtered her way back to the surface, Clint is waving cheerfully from the bank. “Sucker!” he crows, and she mutinously flips him off before swimming back to shore.

On land, Natasha leans over his newly dried head and twists the water from her hair. “This isn’t over,” she vows before retrieving her bag, but she can’t say with certainty what exactly she means to continue.


	2. i want to feel the way the moon feels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from **sgteam14283** over at the be_compromised promptathon: “I feel like an idiot.” “Good, you finally came to your senses.”
> 
> Title from ["for the nights when I feel too much"](http://quidnunc-life.tumblr.com/post/163984653492/i-want-to-feel-the-way-that-the-moon-feels) by Zoe Lianne!

“So she’s just  _ staring _ at me, right?” Clint says, not really a question. “And, like, we’re in the middle of the river, the moon’s out, and we’re in our  _ underwear _ and she looks like a  _ mermaid, _ and she says, ‘Clint,’ all quiet and closes her eyes and--”

“And?” repeats Maria with a  _ get to the point, Barton _ look on her face.

He blinks and thumps his chair legs back to the ground. “Well, and then I figured she’d be pretty pissed if she knew that I was staring at her mouth, so I threw her half across the water and ran away.”

Maria’s rapt attention evaporates and she crumples to her desktop. “Barton,” she says into her arms, “Full offense, but how the hell did you lose your virginity when you don’t know when someone is giving you a fucking signal.” It’s not even a question, just one long groan.

Clint’s not sure, exactly, how it came to be that Maria Hill, who generally doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about anyone, is his sole confidant regarding his enduring, embarrassing crush on his partner. One moment he’d been sitting in the cafeteria, pretending not to watch the sun catch in Natasha’s hair as she laughed with Sharon, and the next moment Hill had propped herself next to him, grinning far too much like Fury for his comfort. “Staring at her isn’t going to make her like you,” she’d unhelpfully pointed out, and had only laughed when he’d glowered in response.

In the present, Clint bristles. “I’ll have you know that I am  _ great _ in bed,” he informs Maria. It’s not exactly something he’d ever anticipated saying to his literal boss, but she started it. “And I know what a signal is! That wasn’t a signal, that was just--” Just Natasha wrapped up in his arms, slick and smooth and staring at his shoulders like she’s never seen them before. Just the moonlight shining like stars in her eyes before they drifted shut. Just the perfect fucking setting for a perfect fucking kiss and he’s  _ so fucking stupid-- _ Clint drops his face into his hands. “I’m such a fucking idiot.”

Maria whirls one unimpressed finger in a circle. “Finally, he comes to his senses,” she says, pulling herself back upright. “Okay, so did anything happen after that?” One thing about Maria: she’s thorough about all things, even gossip.

Clint shrugs. “She stomped out of the river and squeezed water onto my hair? I think I deserved that, though. And then we looked at the stars for a while and fell asleep.”

He doesn’t think this merits quite as much of a sigh as Maria gives him. “Jesus, you’re bad at this,” she informs him, blunt as always. “Why am I helping you, again?”

As far as he can tell, she’s not: all Maria ever does is tell him he’s dumb and give him terrible suggestions like “just talk to her” and “ask her to get dinner, Barton, it’s not that hard.” “Because you love me?” he tries, anyway, unrolling his most cherubic smile. “Because you’re secretly a big, romantic softie?”

“Wrong on both counts,” Maria sniffs, but there’s a hint of a smile lurking. “I’m just tired of intercepting your longing glances, so listen.” She leans forward, intent. “For whatever poorly thought out reason, she’s given you an opening, which means she is [A] interested, and [B] likely to do it again. Keep your eyes open, and next time, instead of staring at her mouth,  _ take it.” _ She sits back and picks up a file to indicate that this conversation is over. “Go to the range or something; I have real work to do.”

There’s no point in reminding her that  _ she _ had pulled  _ him _ into her office for this conversation, not the other way around. Instead, Clint wanders off to bury some arrows in a bullseye and think over Maria’s advice. For once, her suggestion doesn’t require him to put himself out there, throw himself to the proverbial wolves; all he has to do is pay attention. 

And, well, it’s not like he’s not always paying attention to Natasha, anyway. It’s hard not to, honestly, what with the effortless way she commands a room, demands respect, makes sure nobody ever forgets just how powerful she is. And then there’s the tilt of her eyes when she’s annoyed and gentle dip of her lip when she’s amused and also, well, he doesn’t exactly  _ mind _ the catsuit.

He doesn’t mind anything about Natasha, at all.

So the next time she gets the drop on him in the ring, he pays attention to the single second in which her triumphant smile blazes extra hot, scorching him from the inside out. When Agent Drew bellies up next to him at the bar the next time all the STRIKE units go out and flashes a blatantly flirtatious smile, he pays attention to the new tightness in Natasha’s usual beleaguered smirk as she leaves, far more attention than he pays to Agent Drew herself. When Natasha asks at lunch the next day how the rest of his night went, he steals her chocolate pudding and pays attention to the fact that she lets him. “It didn’t,” he says through a mouthful of chocolate mush, “I went home alone,” and pays attention to the tiniest release of her shoulders even though all she drily says is, “I can’t imagine why.”

“Yes, but none of these are  _ openings,” _ Maria says impatiently at their next strategy-meeting-slash-performance-review (that’s what it’d said in the calendar hold she’d sent, at least, and far be it from Clint to understand why that was necessary). “All this means is that she probably at least sort of likes you.”

“We’re best friends,” he points out. “Of course she likes me. Maybe she just didn’t think Agent Drew was the one for me.”

Maria sighs and props her head in her hand like this is all so exhausting. Whatever, this meeting was all her idea. “Thank god you’re not this obtuse in the field,” she comments. “I can’t believe I have to spell this out for you. The next time you’re watching a movie or robbing the Louvre or whatever it is you two do when you’re alone?  _ That’s _ when you should be looking for an opening.” She looks him over and whatever she sees on his face makes her roll her eyes. “Ugh. I hate that I’m invested in this.”

Clint smiles with all the impish charm he has. “I can’t help that I’m so loveable,” he chirps, dodging the pen she throws at him as he leaves. He knows, technically, the way  _ openings _ and  _ moments _ and all that shit works, honest; despite his abysmal showing, he  _ has _ gotten laid. It’s just that Natasha is so entirely, overwhelmingly out of his league that his brain looks at what would seem like an opening with anyone else and says  _ yeah fucking right, Barton. Dream on. _ Hence, the spectacular disaster in the river. That stupid river.

“I hate rivers,” Clint announces the next weekend when he turns the TV on and  _ The African Queen _ is showing. He’s had a few days to stew on this, and he’s now firm in his belief. “Rivers ruin everything.”

Natasha blinks at him. It’s the weekend, so she’s in leggings and big fluffy socks, her slender frame half swallowed by his ratty old SHIELD issue sweatshirt that she probably doesn’t know makes his heart backflip every time she wears it. They’re on her couch, and she’s stretched out lengthwise with her legs thrown over his lap, and honestly, Clint wouldn’t change a thing. “All rivers?” she asks, casual, as if declaring hatred for geographical features is totally normal.

“All rivers,” Clint confirms. If it wasn’t for that dumb river, he wouldn’t be so acutely aware of the shape of her lips as she silently mouths the words along with the book she’s reading. He’s loved her forever, yeah, but it was there in the Dolomites that it all rose to the surface with the stirred up silt, as impossible to ignore as the dappled silver reflection of the moon. “They can all dry up.”

Natasha points a look at him that he’s never seen before, assessing and hesitant and soft. Setting her book aside, she scoots into an upright position until they’re face to face. “That’s too bad,” she says, a careful weight on each word. Her green eyes are wide and serious, searching his own for he knows not what. “I had just been thinking that we should go camping in the Dolomites again.” She pauses, looks at him meaningfully. “You know, by the river.”

“Oh,” Clint says weakly: she’s so close to him, and that proximity combined with the force of her gaze significantly diminishes his ability to think. “That--that one can stay, then--”

“Oh my  _ god, _ Hill was right,” she explodes. “You are the most  _ oblivious-- _ ” And he’d really like to argue the point, except that she grabs his collar and hauls his lips to hers and it’s kind of hard to talk--or think, for that matter--when her hands are under his shirt and her tongue is in his mouth. “Does that clear things up?” she asks a while later, breathless and bright eyed. “Or do I need to elaborate?”

“Please,” Clint says, scooping her up and settling her more squarely in his lap. “Elaborate. At length.”

\-----

“Oh, no,” says Maria when Clint strolls into her office the following Monday wearing the happiest, most enormous shit-eating grin. “This is infinitely worse.”


End file.
